Meridian Critic

The present paper investigates the features of an American icon, the automobile, as presented in Stephen King’s novel, Christine. This symbol is used in King’ horror novel to portray the social mechanisms of an American community and to convey the overwhelming meaning of alienation. The text goes beyond the supernatural or inexplicable forces which determine intricate love and death relationships, and focuses on technofetishism and its ethical implications.

The paper argues that Paul Auster’s novel, The Book of Illusions, is an all-American spin-off. Considering the development of the writer over a fifteen year period, I read him in terms of the follow-up routine he indulges in. The bond between his 2002 novel and The New York Trilogy (1987) is the unfolding of a coveted literary discourse, heavily indebted to its cultural environment. However, I think that the exchange between the former and the latter is mutual: tapping into the reservoir of what has become mainstream – partly due to its own accomplishments – both redeems and plagues his writing. I aimed to track down the translation of social references into fictional language, with a view to proving that the author evolves from the mannerism of aesthetical disengagement (The New York Trilogy) to interventional practices (The Book of Illusions). I mean that cultural action politicises the novel, with the notions of economics and liberation lurking in the background. The resulting post-capitalist narrative quotes the camerawork technique, dormant in the movie-going audience of the twentieth century, and climaxes in pop-culture stock phrases.

This article approaches the symbolism of the sheriff badge in John M. Cunningham’s short story, The Tin Star. It follows the moral dilemma of sheriff Doane, confronted with a Ricoeurian boundary situation, and his final decision to face history rather than try to escape it. The analysis focuses on interpreting the ways in which wearing a tin star changed one’s destiny, transforming the individual into a historical tool, predestined to defend the values of Americanness.

The present article is devoted to John Kennedy Toole’s iconic anti-hero, Ignatius Reilly, more precisely to his misreading of the novel’s hypertext (The Consolation of Philosophy by Roman philosopher Boethius). In accordance with several authoritative voices in the field of Toolean studies, the article explores the Boethius-Ignatius-Toole triangle and argues that Ignatius, for all his blighted worldview, exemplifies a paradigm of the human condition that sometimes affords a reject the liberty to reject his rejecters.

Just like any other product of media culture, video games are vessels for cultural and social meaning. Despite their seeming gratuity, these texts make a political statement on what truly matters in today's society. Video games are a space of liberty and subversion which challenges mainstream discourse while offering alternative readings of reality. Grand Theft Auto IV, Liberty City is a game about social relations within a Darwinian world of free initiative, an ironic replica of Neoliberal America where the strongest and the most intrepid have the upper hand. It follows the story of Niko Bellic, a self made man, as he strives to pursue the American Dream. The hero goes deep into the obscure criminal underworld, making his way to the top of the social ladder by illegal means. The game is a complex allegory based on consistent allusions to social relations that structure reality.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, appears to have more in common with classical Gothic fiction than with classical Westerns. The baffling violence as well as the undecided border between the abused and the abuser, the moral and the immoral, good and evil, death and life, etc. are as many reasons for reading the novel violently, for extracting meaning at all costs, no matter how far-fetched the conclusions and how disparate the arguments. We impose on the text an interpretation that fits our own desire and draw a parallel with Stoker’s equally traumatizing Dracula. Such a reading is but a replica of the random and senseless violence of the text, a violence that is not attached to logic and is not regulated by method.

This text presents the main aspects of the Romanian surrealism before the Second World War, when it was not yet a homogenous movement with a coherent theoretical doctrine following the pattern imposed by the French leader André Breton. Thus, neither the group formed around the review unu (“one”) in the late twenties, nor the group formed around the review Alge (“Algae”) in the early thirties were not called “surrealist”, although the texts published by their members were doubtlessly of surrealist inspiration. Therefore, this first stage of the Romanian surrealism can be called “intuitive” in the sense that Maurice Nadeau gave the term in 1964. Also following the model of their French fellows, these first Romanian surrealists became politically engaged after 1933, when they openly sustained the proletarian revolution (the artistic and political revolution became inseparable).

The paper examines the way in which Angela Carter’s story takes its shape in an intertextual theatre in which the problem of its own identity is dramatised, showing that heterogeneity and fragmentariness appear to keep the text in a kind of ‘mirror stage’. The central argument is that the specular devices (both textual and thematic) by means of which the narrative is articulated illustrate the return of the Baroque sensibility in the postmodern age.

Postcolonial Studies has become one of the most contested fields of study in this increasingly globalised academic world. Ever since its inception in the academic world in 1989 with the work of Ashcroft, et al, this field of study has undergone many radical changes. Yet what remains unattended in this study is the mistreatment meted out to minor communities and their cultures. The present paper aims to focus on this serious gap inherent in the field of postcolonial studies. It argues that the lack of attention and withdrawal from migratory communities at places which supposedly claim to be the centre of multiculturalism and transnationalism is an outcome of authorial deliberations of postcolonial critics.

The importance of Paul Celan’s lyrics to hermeneutic philosophy is concisely emphasized by a short essay of Hans-Georg Gadamer (afterwards turned into a book), that was written shortly after the poet’s death. Who Am I and Who Are You?, by rotation of emitent / receptor stances, seems to acknowledge Gadamer’s concept of fusion of horizons that is the fundament of his hermeneutics.

The aim of this article is to present a global image of the Romanian press closely related to the development of the society, in order to demonstrate the fact that the discourse of the print media is a point of reference for the intercultural representations. The journals submitted to analysis are the literary journals published at the boundary between ages. We presented these journals by order of the significant part they played in the development of the Romanian literary press in the long run. Our presentation also took into account the thematic affinities and the literary orientations they proposed to their readers.

In the definition of popular culture are faced enough difficulties, because of the diversity and spread of this field: from football matches to life in high school, cartoons until sope operas. The objectives of the proposed analysis are identifying intertextuality and entertainment features of a popular culture product, in television series Doctor House. The building of the the popular culture model starts from the mythical paradigms or used stereotypes and conventions that are easily recognizable to reach the public, such as quotes that remind us of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. More than just identifying patterns, popular culture product took into account the target audience and satisfy the need to unwind, to relax, to forget about everyday life.